Who Can Be Bothered with Blogs?
Let’s be honest. Blogs are a faff.
One that many small business owners would dearly love to avoid.
Hours of valuable time are sunk into creating content to appease unknowable SEO overlords in the hopes that they will start magically sending traffic your way.
If your business is going to take a hit on time and money to get these things written and into the world, we might as well make sure that each and every post it’s pulling its weight.
Here, we dive into all the ways that your blog could and should be working for your business.
An Honorable Mention
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first.
Blogs are a great way to get lots of keywords onto your website and start building authority with search engines in your area of expertise.
Every new post brings new opportunities for a new customer to stumble across you in search. Get it right, and this can be a massively powerful tool.
But the potential for your blog posts reaches far wider...
Five Strategies to Make Your Business Visible Through Blogging
Strategy 1: Educating Your Audience
The chances are, many of your ideal clients don’t actually know why they need your services.
Why should I hire a photographer when my friend can take some perfectly lovely photos on a phone? Why should I want a social media manager when I can happily stick a few posts up myself?
Your blog is your opportunity to show your customers why you are an expert and what you can do for them.
It could be as simple as saving them time!
Strategy 2: Creating Content
The world seems to be full of content these days.
Social media posts, YouTube videos, podcasts… the list goes on.
The reality of running an online business is that you need content to get seen, but have you ever found that when you sit down to plan your content calendar, you can’t think of anything to say?
Enter: repurposing.
Use your blog content to create more content elsewhere.
Chat about it on your Instagram stories. Pop it on your LinkedIn profile. Pin to your Pinterest boards. Start a conversation on X. Show it off in your Facebook groups. Give your email list a sneak peak.
Sprout Social has a fantastic article on how you can really hone the skill of repurposing.
Stop reinventing the wheel for every post. Use the hard work you’ve already done.
Strategy 3: Creating Backlinks
Keywords are fantastic, but they don’t work alone when it comes to SEO.
You also need (among other things) backlinks.
A backlink is a link to your website from another. I just created one for Sprout Social in the previous section.
Your website can then piggyback off the trust the linking website has built, and feel safer to promote you up their rankings.
So, how do you build backlinks?
It’s tricky, so you have to give people a reason to do it. They’re unlikely to have a reason to link to your services page, so you need to give them something relevant and useful.
People may organically pick up your content when doing their own research and happily link to it, just as I have here. But that’s a long slow process, so you might want to speed it up.
Newsworthy content can be pitched to journalists or other websites in your industry, who might want to report on it.
Look for unusual patterns in your business, or unique stories that might interest others. Write your article, then spread the word.
Strategy 4: Pitching to Collaborators
Collaboration is such a powerful marketing tool, and can benefit both parties.
Your blogs are a tool that can make it happen.
If you’re pitching to write a guest blog, feature on a podcast or YouTube video, or get on a joint Instagram Live, sending a well crafted blog post along with your pitch can do wonders.
It can show the other person your unique point of view, and perhaps demonstrate the story you have to tell.
Use your blogs to demonstrate the value you’re offering to their platform.
Strategy 5: Selling Yourself
Finally, your blog should be your platform to SELL YOURSELF!
This could be a direct sales pitch like… “I can write your blogs for you! Head here to find out more!” (see what I did there?).
Or to more subtly sell by growing that all important trifecta of know, like and trust.
Use it to guide users to pages of your website you’d like them to see.
And finally, don’t forget to include a call to action, like this one:
If you love the idea of blogging, but can’t find the time, get in contact now to find out how we can work together to get them off your plate.
